


somewhat perilous but not disagreeable

by winchilsea



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, Huddling For Warmth, Introspection, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-29
Updated: 2015-08-29
Packaged: 2018-04-17 21:30:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4682156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winchilsea/pseuds/winchilsea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is silly to want to tie herself to these men—to want the three of them to bleed into each other until they are inseparable. Like smoke, like myths, like spies, they will part ways and vanish into the annals of history, their names blacked out from the books.</p>
            </blockquote>





	somewhat perilous but not disagreeable

**Author's Note:**

> "Clock strikes—going out to make love. Somewhat perilous but not disagreeable." — Lord Bryon

That time, Istanbul, when things were still very new and very shadowed, and they had yet to grow into each other they way San Marino made them—that time that the three of them have buried, carefully, underneath the weight of the years so that they could not now identify it as foundation or tree.

 

_(“Ridiculous,” Gaby murmurs, “we laid the foundation in Rome.” Then, frowning, with her head tipped back and eyes on the ceiling, she tries again. “No, that isn’t quite right. Rome was—what was Rome, boys?”)_

 

They stay in a hovel outside of Istanbul, waylaid by the weather.

“This?” Gaby scoffs. “This is not a hovel.”

Solo turns his big eyes on her, wounded. The crisp lines of his suit look offensively out of place in the small room. He spreads his arms. If he leaned a little from side-to-side, his fingertips would brush the walls.

Outside, the wind whips at the trees and the rain pounds at the window. Gaby nods at it pointedly and says, as proper as she can, “We have a window.”

“And only two beds,” Solo continues, slow and disbelieving. 

They both turn to Illya, whose gaze goes back and forth between the two of them. Then, having seemed to understand he needs to be a mediator, he flounders. “Me?” his face says. He takes his hands out of his pockets. “It’s nice hovel,” he says, tentatively.

Solo straightens up and smiles his smug, polite smile. Gaby crosses her arms. 

“I’m not sharing a bed with either one of you,” she says and knows that she has won.

 

_(“Rome was an impetus,” Solo says, in that careful way of his. The words vibrate in Gaby’s ear, which is pressed to his chest. She can feel him breathing. “A catalyst,” he continues. “In the beginning there was nothing, and a great force rendered everything into existence.” Their edges are soft tonight, and something about the city or the room or the bed feels indulgent. Illya is tracing idle circles on her ankle, like he is at peace.)_

 

The only lighting afforded in the room is a lamp, which is feeble and flickering. Gaby has wrapped herself up in a blanket to fight against the sudden chill of the night. On the other bed, the men are sat stiffly, an obvious foot of distance between them, though Solo at least feigns nonchalance.

They are alone in this room. Their only company is each other and what they have done to each other, things of which they have not yet spoken. It makes her ill to think about, even though she owed neither of them anything at the time. She puts on a smile and gathers her temerity, trembling though it is.

“It’s cold,” she says, making sure that her teeth clack audibly. Solo’s eyebrows shoot up. Illya shifts uncomfortably. 

Gaby bobs her head, waiting for one of them to pick up on her cue. 

Unsurprisingly, it’s Solo who makes to get up while saying, “Well then, perhaps—”

Illya’s hand is on Solo’s thigh, and the look on his face is thunderous. He says, caustic, “No.”

“No, it’s not cold?” Gaby asks. She shivers deliberately.

“It is cold,” Illya says, starting to look a little lost and a little frantic. At his side, Solo sighs and looks pitying. Illya’s hand has not moved. 

There is only the sound of the wind now, and their breathing, and Gaby imagines that she can hear their watches ticking in sync. 

 

_(“That is not how theory works,” Illya mutters, pressing his lips to her knee. He is propped up on some pillows with his back to the headboard, the same as Solo, who is cradling Gaby. Her head lolls to the side, and Solo gently nudges it back against his chest. They wait for Illya to offer the correct theory, to explain to them meticulously how the universe really came into existence, but Illya says, “Rome was Rome.” He is always sparing with his words.)_

 

In the end they drag one of the mattresses onto the floor between the two beds, which accommodates it with only a couple of centimeters to spare. Illya has the task of stripping the other bed, and he does it efficiently while looking like he’d rather be doing anything else.

Solo looks at Gaby, amused. She thinks she understands his character. Waverly had briefed her—she knows Solo likes taking his pleasure where he can find it, but he is not a coarse man. There is nothing dark and cruel hiding within him. 

Not like there is in Illya, but that’s his personal demon. 

When the mattress is fixed up as well as they can given what they have, Solo takes the liberty of lying down first, shoulder pressed up against the bed frame. He still takes up more than half the mattress. Silence overtakes the room as they contemplate how to go about this.

Nudging Illya, she says, “Go on, then.”

His mouth pinches, but he settles himself on the other side of the mattress. Boxed in by the bed frames, the men have nowhere to escape and tactfully turn to lie on their sides. It still leaves very little room for Gaby, if any.

Illya sits up.

“Lie back down.”

He obeys.

With a fortifying breath—because who knows how easily she’ll be able to breathe when pressed between these two giants—Gaby places her knee on the edge of the mattress and starts crawling.

All Gaby can hear is her breathing, the shift of fabric against fabric, the mattress groaning as she transfers her weight. She stumbles, and there are hands immediately on her. If she wasn’t already cold she’d flinch. Her wrist pops when she lowers herself into the gap, hesitating only briefly on which side she should face. The hands have not left her.

They are both so close she can feel them breathing, not just their ribcages expanding but Solo’s breath on the back of her neck, Illya’s breath across the bridge of her nose.

Illya withdraws his hands, once more stiff. Gaby closes her eyes and knows that he needs them to be brave for him, so she shuffles closer as best she can and tangles their legs together. She grabs Solo’s hand, still on her waist, and brings it forward. He gets the message and closes the equation.

Wrapped up between them like this, with Illya tentatively reaching out and Solo boldly encroaching forward, it is easy to imagine that there won’t be any consequences.

She says, “I was scared.”

Solo does something that might have been kissing her shoulder. Illya says, the words rumbling at her temple, “Yes, you said were scared, and then you betrayed us.”

She noses at his collarbone. “You were using me.”

In her ear, Solo says, “Yes, but we were honest about it.”

“Were you honest with each other?”

Illya curls inward, yielding. “We do not need to be.”

It is silly to want to tie herself to these men—to want the three of them to bleed into each other until they are inseparable. Like smoke, like myths, like spies, they will part ways and vanish into the annals of history, their names blacked out from the books.

Everyone turns fortuneteller in the darkness. Gaby can see it. They will be nameless separately, but together they might be remembered—greater than the sum of their parts. Napoleon Solo will gradually be erased from documents and files, sifted through the sieve. Illya Kuryakin will vanish in the snow, which falls afresh every day. Gaby Teller will be a footnote, remembered as her father’s daughter. 

She doesn’t want infamy. She doesn’t want to be one day old and grey, sitting on her rocking chair, trying to gather wisps and vapors of a history that could have been. The world is an eggshell that has been cracked, glass that has been shattered, earth that is shifting still, tumultuous. That the three of them might one day find themselves separated by a deep, untraversable gorge sits melancholy on her tongue, and she cannot make herself say the words.

She doesn’t know these men. These men don’t know her.

How strange, the camaraderie between spies who might have killed each other—between spies who have indeed tried to kill each other. Built and bricked with shared experiences using secrets for mortar, brittle as glass, opaque as cement. Camaraderie means many things, but not blind trust. Wide awake in the darkness, they are restless.

“I thought you said you won’t sleep with either one of us,” Solo says, teasing. 

“We’re not in a bed, we’re on a mattress.” Her words come out muffled by Illya’s shirt.

“There is difference?”

Gaby lifts her chin, enough to lightly headbutt Illya’s jaw.

Solo answers, pained, “There is a world of difference.”

This is another thing Gaby thinks she understands about their characters: Illya recognizes luxury, Solo lives it. 

Earlier, when they were undressing, she watched them both neatly fold their clothes, the layers and layers of Solo’s suit, the pragmatic lines of Illya’s ensemble. She has nothing they didn’t buy for her.

Illya strokes her arm, where the scabs are still healing. The room is impossibly warm—it was never cold enough to warrant this to begin with. Her eyes grow heavy with sleep, and when someone says something, inquiring, she mumbles back nonsense.

 

_(Someone is humming. It doesn’t sound like anything Gaby’s heard on the radio. Her eyes crack open, and she sees Illya resting his head on Solo’s shoulder. He is looking at her. They both are.)_

 

The sky is blinding bright after last night’s rain. They dress facing different corners of the room—or they started that way, and now they’re all partially dressed and facing each other as they finish, carefully going over the plan.

“Gaby and I will be newlyweds,” Solo says.

“No,” Illya says.

“I admit it’s a little inconvenient on my part, but I can work with playing a married man,” Solo says, deliberately misunderstanding and plowing on. 

“No,” Illya says again, firmer. Gaby fans herself. It’s so much hotter here during the day. “No one will believe this sham if you plan on flirting with every woman.”

“We’re young and impulsive,” says Solo. “They’ll buy it.”

“They won’t.”

“Boys, please,” says Gaby. Her dress is hitched up to her thighs as she rolls on her stockings. She takes her time, and when they finally look up from the black silk and meet her eyes, she looks back serenely.

Solo doesn’t falter in buttoning up his shirt, but he does give her a smile. Illya’s eyes are dark, and they flicker back to her thighs before he turns away.

“I will do it,” says Illya.

“You can’t fake a British accent,” says Solo, affecting one. It rolls on too smoothly, the vowels suddenly round and comfortable in his mouth. His voice, always careful and measured, like a master key able to fit into any lock and coax it open, sounds at ease, but also practiced. Too posh, but she won’t tell him that.

Illya's fingers tap at his thigh. She looks at Solo, still wearing his congenial smile. Her mouth pinches; he keeps smiling. Widening her eyes, she mouths “do something”; he keeps smiling.

Suggesting that she and Solo play siblings occurs to her, but Gaby hesitates. Illya is a spy, a KGB agent, he does not need coddling, and sooner or later he’ll have to see that not everything can go his way. The plan remains unchanged.

 

_(Solo says, “Out of chaos God made a world, and out of high passions come a people.”)_

 

“I told you it would not work,” says Illya, smug.

Gaby breathes through her nose and concentrates on clinging to his arm and not falling to a messy death. Because she is vulnerable, she says, “Please don’t drop me.” 

The winds up here are cold, but the sun beating down her is hot. The rough sides of the building scrape against her skin. Hair in her mouth and fear in her eyes, Gaby looks up at Illya, tries to swallow the panic. They’re going to die—Gaby almost definitely, but Illya will die if he doesn’t let go of her. It’s only a matter of time before the roof is surrounded.

Illya’s grip tightens, and his expression turns serious. Suddenly, with a kind of stirring faith, she remembers that this man saved her immediately after she betrayed him.

“You are going to be all right,” he says. Then his eyes cut to something behind her, and he says, “I am going to drop you now.”

He lets go as her mouth opens—a gasp, a silent scream, a furious curse—and the weightless fall feels like death. 

Solo is pulling her in through the window, putting her on her feet, asking her, “Can you walk?”

A little shaky, but firm, Gaby nods. 

“Good. Can you run?” 

“Yes,” says Gaby, gasping. “Yes.” And they run, Solo pulling her along by the hand.

 

_(They are sinking lower and lower, until Gaby finally squirms into the space between them, splitting them apart. “Rome,” says Gaby. “Rome.”)_

 

Purple bruises stain Illya’s wrist. They’ll have to see a doctor, but Illya hisses, “No doctors.” 

Gaby protests. 

Solo looks very calm, saying also, “No doctors.” Then he knocks Illya out and slings him over his shoulder. “Let’s go find a doctor.”

“He’s going to be angry when he wakes,” Gaby warns.

“So we’ll put you in a sick bed and say the doctor was for you.”

It’s clever. It also implies something she doesn’t want to hope for. In the light, all those prophetic thoughts swimming in her head vanish—exorcised by clarity, by self-preservation, by instinct. What exists between them outside of duty? Even duty means nothing to them. Gaby holds no allegiances, only debts. She thinks it’s the same for them as well. Solo owes a prison sentence. Illya is paying for the sins of the father. When they’re in the black, will they fracture? Like strangers once more, they part ways, and the reality will be that they never knew each other at all, that they will have been strangers the whole journey.

An ache starts up in her sternum, one which has nothing to do with hanging off the side of a building for half an hour, or the ensuing getaway, or the tumble she and Solo both took down the stairs. Gaby Teller has lived behind an iron curtain her entire life, defined only by her father’s name and the use she could bring to other people because of it. She doesn’t know who she is, unmoored now from the chop shop. Like phantom grease stains on her elbows, her identity smudges and wipes almost clean. With them she is a spy. Without them she might still be a spy, but who will she be? Only Illya and Solo have fragments of her embedded in their skin, upon whose reflections she depends. That glimpse, flinty and splintered, serves as a reminder—there she is, that’s who she needs to be. 

Look a little longer, a little more closely, and she might even be able to piece those fragments together, make herself whole.

The sun is setting.

 

_(Illya rests his head on Gaby’s breasts. She lets him, stroking her fingers through his hair. He says, “Rome was a beginning.” And what of Istanbul?)_

 

In the hospital, it turns out Illya’s wrist is broken, Gaby’s ribs are bruised, and Solo is completely unscathed. Istanbul has been generous with them. She wonders if this is how she will remember cities from now on, in bruises and bones.

With Waverly on his way to meet them and the hospital deemed secure, Solo has taken up a bed and is—pretending to be—asleep. Maybe to avoid Illya, now that the man has woken. 

There is a particular look on his face, akin to betrayal. It makes Gaby feel like she’s just kicked a dog. The look intensifies when he catches sight of his cast. 

“I said no doctors.”

Gaby stiffens. Her spine straightens automatically, and she turns away from him, careless. “I said don’t drop me.” An unfair reprimand. Even with his life on the line and his wrist broken, he didn’t let go of her until he knew she’d be safe.

Illya says, “You agreed, no doctors, cowboy.”

And Solo replies, “I’m sleeping.”

“Your wrist is broken,” Gaby says, picking at her ripped stockings.

And Solo, who is not very good at pretending to be asleep, says, “She bruised her ribs.”

“What about you?” Illya asks.

“Not a scratch.”

Gaby tamps down on a smile. Even looking away she can hear Illya’s scowl and Solo’s smug smile.

 

_(“Istanbul was an understanding.”)_

**Author's Note:**

> "Out of chaos God made a world, and out of high passions come a people." — Lord Byron


End file.
